By Wayne Roberts Jack Layton’s death on August 22 feels so cry-out-loud tragic – and has touched a chord across the country with an outpouring of national grief, leading the federal government to hold a formal state funeral in his honor – because he was still brimming with vitality, positive energy and hope even as he knew cancer was stealing…
Author: Wayne Roberts
Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer, widely respected for his role as the manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, a citizen body of 30 food activists and experts that is widely recognized for its innovative approach to food security, from 2000-2010.
As a leading member of the City of Toronto’s Environmental Task Force, he helped develop a number of official plans for the city, including the Environmental Plan and Food Charter, adopted by Toronto City Council in 2000 and 2001 respectively. Many ideas and projects of the TFPC are featured in Roberts’ book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food (2008).
Since 1989, Roberts has written a weekly column for Toronto’s NOW Magazine, generally on themes that link social justice, public health and green economics.
In 2002, he received the Canadian Environment Award for his contributions to sustainable living. NOW Magazine named Roberts one of Toronto’s leading visionaries of the past 20 years. In 2008, he received the Canadian Eco-Hero Award presented by Planet in Focus. In 2011, he received the University of Toronto Arbor Award for his role in establishing food studies as a field of study at University of Toronto.
Roberts earned a Ph.D. in social and economic history from the University of Toronto in 1978, and has written seven books, including Get A Life! (1995), a manual on green economics, and Real Food For A Change (1999), which promotes a food system based on the four ingredients of health, joy, justice and nature.
Roberts chaired the influential and Toronto-based Coalition for a Green Economy for 15 years. He has also served on the Board of the U.S.-based Community Food Security Coalition and Food Secure Canada. He is on the board of Green Enterprise Toronto, an organization of local eco-businesses that’s associated with the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies across North America. He has been invited to speak around the world on strategies that combine food security, community empowerment, environmental improvement, social equity and job creation.
Prior to his involvement with environmental issues, Roberts worked for two decades in the fields of community organizing, university teaching, media, labour education, industrial relations and union administration.
Big Powers Missing in Action on Food Price Crisis but New Leaders Emerge
Find Wayne’s article Here Featured On the WorldWatch Institute website.
How government food policy got in your face but not in your heart
Cuts to Government Services, But not to Double Standards By Wayne Roberts Politicians at all levels are promising more cuts to government expenses without any cut to services. For politicians, this is better than a gift that keeps on giving. It’s a promise they can keep on promising. For most of the past 40 years, North American and British politicians…
Open Pit Gravel Mine Tells Farmers to “Eat My Dust”
Although the Ontario election is still six months away, the surprise candidate for most polarizing issue likely to turn the political contest into an emotional cliffhanger has already come to the fore. A 6 billion tonne gravel “mega quarry” – second-largest in North America – has been proposed in what is now quiet farm and cottage country some 100 kilometers…
Whatever Happened to Election Debates on Economics?
Tears have been wiped dry, major resignations are in, and thoughts about ways of overcoming disproportionate misrepresentation allowing Harpers Conservatives to turn 39 per cent of all votes into a majority government are in the hopper. But the sleeper issue on the political agenda continues to doze. One reason why all pundits are talking about the electoral politics of the…
A New Political Alignment May Follow Canada’s Federal Election
As much as Canada’s federal election delivered historic consequences for every political party, the election’s future significance turns more on historic changes within the electorate than on changes of any significance within any particular party. There’s a strong — though barely visible — possibility that the unrest and volatility expressed by voters will drive political change during the next years…
Thoroughly Modern Dorothy: Why I Remember Mealtime on Mother’s Day
My Mom and Dad came of age in Toronto during the “Dirty Thirties,” but even by the standards of that era, they had more than their share of bad breaks. Mom was given up for adoption as a baby, lost her adoptive mom at 14, and was rescued from the streets by a warm and generous family, the Farmers. Dad’s…
Foods of Locality: Food With a Place in Your Heart
Food is a many-splendored thing, so the more we learn about it, the more we discover new ways to look for it, and come to appreciate why the centre of gravity for food thinking keeps lurching in different directions. This year’s Earth Day is time to name and celebrate a signpost on the latest lurch – foods of locality, a…
Japan’s Earthquake-Tsunami Made Worse by High Risk Technologies Everywhere
Japan’s ordeal upsets and confronts onlookers because of the way tragedies unfolding from the natural disaster of an earthquake and tsunami touched off the unraveling of a more ominous human mistake – construction of a nuclear power plant in a known earthquake zone. Other disasters of recent years – such as tsunamis in Indonesia and Thailand, hurricanes in New Orleans,…
The Pillars of Cheap Food are Cracking
The worldwide price level of food is taking a great leap upward for the second time in less than five years. My bet is that this food price hike will match a rise in oil prices for wrenching impact on geopolitics, especially as the two are intimately connected. Food cannot be fertilized and shipped without imports of cheap fossil fuels,…